Friday, September 7, 2012

TEPCO still hasn't identified the cause for the decreased water flow into the reactors (1, 2, and 3), but the company suspects some rust or foreign particles clogging the system somewhere. On September 5, a video camera was submerged into one of the buffer tanks that store the treated water before the water is fed back into the reactors.

White particles floating around, like near the bottom of the ocean. I wonder what they are. TEPCO explains the bubbling seen in the video as "nitrogen".

Here's a photo of the strainer of one of the 5 "chiller" machines (to cool water), from TEPCO's 9/5/2012 Photos and Videos page. Rust flakes and curled-up white bits. (It looks like bits of jellyfish...) Click to enlarge.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

as if he has any say in it. Or maybe he thinks he will shortly. He must be counting on the Liberal Democratic Party becoming the ruling party again, with one of his sons at the helm. (That son was the one who diagnosed people against nuclear power as suffering from hysteria, in July last year.)

As Jiji Tsushin reports, he spoke like the de facto leader of LDP anyway.

In the meantime, when asked about the national government having come to an agreement with the owner of the Senkaku Islands over the purchase of the island, Governor Ishihara said, "It's up to the owner to decide and sell [if he wants to]. The current administration won't last long anyway, and will be replaced in the next election. LDP has the will to purchase the islands. I want the issue [of the Senkaku Islands] as a focal point in the LDP leadership election."

Never mind that Monju is not the first fast-breeder reactor; it may be epoch-making, but not in the way Ishihara seem to think. Where else has an operator of a fast-breeder reactor that uses liquid sodium as coolant dropped a fuel transfer machine in the reactor? Only in Japan. Or maybe he meant the make-shift technology that JAEA had to devise (or I should say Toshiba and Hitachi had to devise) to fish out the fuel transfer machine without exposing the coolant to the atmosphere.

The whole-body radiation dose estimate for adults (older than 17) in Sendai, Miyagi during the 60 days from March 11 to May 11, 2011 may be as high as 1.2 millisievert, assuming being outside at all times with constant high physical activity levels.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5, 2012 – Though no Defense Department personnel or their families were exposed to radiation causing adverse health conditions following the nuclear accident in Japan last year, the department has established a registry to provide information to those who served in the stricken country.

The March 11, 2011, earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the coast of Japan caused extensive damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant, and radiation leaked from the facility.

The Defense Department has established an Operation Tomodachi registry for the 70,000 U.S. service members, family members, DOD civilians and DOD contractors who were in Japan from March 12 to May 11, 2011, said Dr. Craig Postlewaite, DOD’s director for force readiness and health assurance.

“The concept of a registry evolved very soon after the crisis in Japan,” the doctor said in an interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service. “Initially, there was great emphasis placed on environmental monitoring, because we needed to monitor those levels to ensure that people weren’t adversely affected during the crisis.”

Commanders used the monitoring information to assess whether to evacuate personnel. The monitoring data, plus a policy that required the services to report daily precisely where every service member was, enabled the department to establish the registry, he said. “We then had the capability to provide information on estimated doses of radiation” for each person, Postlewaite said.

The Operation Tomodachi registry is being built in a secure database in which all personal information is protected. The dosage estimates cover 13 different shore-based locations, U.S. Navy ships located off the mainland of Japan and aircrews. It also incorporates about 4,000 U.S. responders who were issued radiation dosimeters. “The registry will be finished this calendar year,” Postlewaite said.

In addition to the registry, DOD is building a companion website to the registry. Individuals cannot be identified on the website, but people can click on a map to determine the exposures in a specific prefecture, base or area for those who spent most of their time on mainland Japan in the timeframe the registry covers. The website also has information on radiation doses from a medical standpoint.

The doses and other information in the registry and on the website have been peer-reviewed and agree with information provided by national and international groups – including the World health organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Dr. Paul Blake, a senior health physicist at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort Belvoir, Va. Blake also serves as the Operation Tomodachi co-chair for the dose assessment and recording working group.

The radiation release from the nuclear plant came in two types, the doctor said. “One was the shorter-lived radioactive iodines,” Blake said. “If you inhale it or ingest it, it has the tendency to collect in your thyroid in your neck. We needed to look at the health risk associated with that.”

The other health risk is radioactive cesium. “Cesium can have a half-life of 30 years, so it is still over there in Japan,” he said.

So from a health risk viewpoint, DOD officials looked at a dose to the thyroid and a dose to the whole body, and “that’s how we prepared the dose assessment for our shore facilities,” he said.

“Both the thyroid and whole body doses are significantly lower than the occupational limits that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission provides for this country,” he added.

What people were doing was as important as where they were, Blake said. “The Marines, for instance, did a lot of humanitarian efforts. When you are out there pushing hard and sweating, you are drinking a lot more water, [and] you are breathing a lot harder,” he explained. “We needed to take into account radionuclides would enter the body at a faster rate than someone doing a more sedentary [job].”

Sex and age made a difference in the assessments also. Absorption of radionuclides changes depending on a person’s gender and age.

Officials also are concerned about children. “They can be more sensitive, because they are still growing,” Blake said. “Fortunately, our children were fairly far back from the actual source. The doses they received were safe.”

"These estimates were calculated based on you spending 24 hours outdoors, having a constantly high physical activity level (and associated reathing rates), and being exposed to the radiation measured in the air, water and soil over the entire 60-day period." (from "Operation Tomodachi Registry Location-Based Radiation Dose Estimate Report")

Well, the US Marines may have done that. I remember watching them at the Sendai Airport on a TV news program, and how they hustled to get the airport open in no time. I didn't connect at that time that radioactive plumes from Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant were passing over them. The cleanup operation (prep) started on March 16, 2011.

And yet, many cynical Japanese who want to consider themselves as "sophisticated" still say, "Oh they did it as a military training exercise, nothing to do with helping the Japanese."

While the Japanese government had the government buildings and public schools cleaned after the earthquake/tsunami, the US military was clearing the ports and roads so that people in the disaster affected areas could have access to outside help. If that was nothing but their military training exercise, that was much better than what the Japanese government was doing.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

(UPDATE 9/7/2012) It looks like Hosono flip-flopped. Now he says he is not running. What a surprise. His reason, according to Yomiuri, is just incredible: 2 weeks of campaigning for the DPJ leadership election will distract him from important tasks for the recovery of Fukushima. That recovery hasn't really happened after one year and 6 months, and he wants us to believe this particular 2-week period in September is too critical. (As I said, incredible.)

(H/T anon reader)

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Oh what a surprise. (Not.)

These DPJ politicians are indeed from outer space, if they think propping up this man will win them the election. But then, more than half the country's population still rely on newspapers and TV who have started touting him as "Prime Minister-in-waiting".

Goshi Hosono is the one who, as the personal assistant to then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan, admitted in April last yearthey knew it was a core melt but just didn't feel like telling that to people.

He's also the one who whipped out a craft piece made of disaster debris in front of an angry crowd at the Kyoto JR Station in March this year and said, "Do you think this is contaminated? Do you?"

Goshi Hosono (age 41), Minister of the Environment and minister in charge of the nuclear accident, has been treading cautiously so far on whether he will enter the race to elect the president of DPJ to be held (notification on September 10, voting on September 21) on the expiration of term of office of Prime Minister Noda (age 55).

Multiple sources close to Mr. Hosono revealed on September 5. An increasing number of people within the party are hoping for the young Hosono to enter the race, as the "face" of the DPJ in the coming Lower House election. If he enters the race, he is likely to be the single major contender against the prime minster who is seeking reelection.

Mr. Hosono has repeatedly said that he is not considering entering the leadership election. However, he said on the evening of September 5, "We should show that the Democratic Party of Japan has been reborn", indicating he would have no choice but eventually agree to running for the position.

In the early hours of September 6, Mr. Hosono told his people that the approach from the younger politicians [urging him to run] should be "considered gravely. I do think I have to do something to [save] the Democratic Party of Japan." His people said, "There's no stopping now."

It's quite remarkable to read the Japanese mainstream media reporting on this news, whether it is Yomiuri or Mainichi or someone else. They completely ignore what he has done (or rather, not done) in the past year and a half, and there's not a single mention of his handling of the wide-area disaster debris, decontamination effort, or disaster relief.

An earlier Yomiuri article (9/5/2012) captures the thinking of some of the supporters of Goshi Hosono. The anonymous politician in the article quite openly says,

「細野氏が首相になれば支持率は５０％まで上がるかもしれない。国会答弁などでボロが出ないうちに、臨時国会冒頭で解散だ」

"If Mr. Hosono becomes the prime minister, the approval rate may shoot up to 50%. Before he makes a fool of himself in the Q&A sessions in the National Diet, we will dissolve the Diet at the beginning of an extraordinary session of the Diet [and call for an election]."

Well that's about right.

Mr. Hosono has a book recently published by the way, titled "Testimony - 500 Days of Nuclear Crisis". It's not that he wrote it himself, but he was interviewed by a journalist who compiled the interview into a book. Get it while you can, the book from the Prime Minister-in-waiting.

FESSENHEIM, France — A steam leak due to an accidental chemical reaction on Wednesday at France's oldest nuclear plant led to two people being slightly burnt and renewed calls to reduce the country's heavy reliance on atomic energy.

The accident occurred at the Fessenheim nuclear power plant in northeastern France within 1.5 kilometres (one mile) of the border with Germany and about 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Switzerland.

"It was not a fire," the local prefecture said, adding that oxygenated steam had escaped after hydrogen peroxide reacted with water in a reservoir.

About 50 firefighters were deployed, an official from the service said.

French power supplier EDF said "two people were slightly burnt through their gloves."

"It was a problem that cropped up during a maintenance operation," in an "auxiliary building in the nuclear complex but not in the building housing the reactor," the electricity giant said.

France is the world's most nuclear-dependent country, operates 58 reactors and has been a leading international proponent of atomic energy.

But in a deal with the Greens before this year's parliamentary and presidential elections, President Francois Hollande's Socialist party promised to reduce reliance on nuclear energy from more than 75 percent to 50 percent by shutting 24 reactors by 2025.

France's reliance on nuclear power has been increasingly called into question since the Fukushima disaster in Japan, which prompted Germany to announce plans to shut all of its reactors by the end of 2022.

Jean-Luc Cardoso, an official with the CGT union at the Fessenheim plant, said: "There was no fire, no death and two colleagues were slightly injured."

France's ecology ministry said there was no safety threat. Ecology Minister Delphine Batho termed it a "workplace accident" and promised that "a complete report on this incident will be made public."

On stream since 1977, Fessenheim has two water reactors. It is built along a huge canal and draws water for cooling from the Rhine river.

Due to its location, it is considered vulnerable to seismic activity and flooding and is provisionally scheduled to close in 2017.

After Wednesday's scare, former Green presidential candidate Noel Mamere said: "This incident proves that we must close Fessenheim as soon as possible," adding that it would be better to spend "billions of euros" on developing renewable energy.

Greenpeace and French environmental group Sortir du Nucleaire (Phase out the Nuclear Age) also mirrored the call.

Fessenheim is France's oldest nuclear power plant, which came on line on January 1, 1978 according to Wiki.

President Francois Hollande of France was expected to announce the closure of the plant once he was elected. (Has he done that yet?)

On September 4, officials from the Fukushima prefectural government dropped by at the conference of the principals of metropolitan (public) high schools (in Tokyo) to promote Fukushima as the destination for the school trips. The number of students who visit Fukushima Prefecture on school trips has dropped off significantly due to the March 11, 2011 earthquake and the nuclear accident.

About 700,000 children used to visit Fukushima Prefecture every year for school trips and training camps. However, last year after the disaster, 90% of these trips were canceled. It hasn't recovered to pre-disaster level yet this year.

So, the Fukushima prefectural government has started an initiative to attract school trips mainly by schools in Kanto Region. On September 4, the officials in charge participated in the conference of principals from metropolitan high schools, which was held in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo.

Mr. Haruo Hoshi, head of the Tourism and Exchange Bureau of Fukushima Prefecture, told the principals, "Except for the areas damaged by the tsunami and the nuclear accident, things are getting back to normal. I would like you to tell the parents [of your students] that Fukushima is safe."

Then, other officials explained that visitors from Tokyo had dropped off dramatically except for training camps by college students, and the prospect was dire, but radiation levels were such that they wouldn't affect health except for part of Fukushima close to [Fukushima I] Nuclear Power Plant.

Mr. Hoshi said, "Fukushima has a lot of cultural and historical attractions, and we offer rich programs for school trips. We will do our best in attracting [the schools] and bring the number of visitors to the pre-disaster level."

Radiation levels are such that they won't affect health, meaning they are low except in the immediate neighborhood of Fukushima I Nuke Plant. Only in the minds of government officials in Fukushima.

To these officials from Fukushima City (that's where the prefectural government office is located), radiation levels in Fukushima City and in Nakadori (middle third) of Fukushima are not high. 1 microsievert/hour at 1 meter off the ground? Not a problem. Why? Because these officials live there and they say so.

What is this obsession of sending or bringing young people and children to Fukushima (of all places)? Remember the misguided attempt to send elementary school children to Date City to give cheer to the people there? The LDP city assemblyman in a city in Osaka who was going to co-sponsor the event was extremely indignant that he was roundly criticized for proposing the trip, which he eventually canceled. He clearly did not understand why people were upset with his project of good intention.

The school principals, being more of administrators than educators, will duly follow official recommendations.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

The country is either in denial, or in delusion, or in both. Or in the same mental state when many truly believed that bamboo spears wielded by young girls could down the B29 bombers. It may have taken 26 years for the Ukrainian government to contemplate redeveloping part of the evacuation zone around Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, but the Japanese will do better than that and do it in three years since the start of the accident.

The Reconstruction Agency, modeled after the one that was set up right after the devastation of Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, says it now has a "Grand Design" (or Gurando Dezain in English that has a meaning only in Japan) for the recovery and reconstruction of the areas around Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant.

Well, the problem is that people have already started returning, whether the infra is ready or not, or whether the national government has a "Grand Design" or not.

On September 4, the Reconstruction Agency finalized its "Grand Design" that lays out the reconstruction of 12 municipalities in Fukushima Prefecture which have been designated as "evacuation areas" of one kind or another after the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident. The plan explicitly says the environment that will allow the residents to return will be in place in 2 years in the areas where evacuation orders have been lifted. To do so, infrastructure improvement, support for long-term evacuees and recovery of local economy will be necessary, and the report further says the national government "will secure ample, long-term funding to achieve them".

The 2-year short-term targets will include the rebuilding of the infrastructure such as water and sewer services and roads in the areas where the evacuation orders have been lifted. In the 5-year medium term, the reconstruction is to accelerate by industrial development and support for the farmers. After the 10th year, the plan will address the long-term goal of employment recovery.

The long-term goal of decontamination is also stated [in the Grand Design]. In the 12 municipalities, decontamination will be done in the areas where the evacuees will return, so that the additional radiation exposure above the natural background is limited to 1 millisievert per year or lower.

As to the "temporary town" plan where the residents of the municipalities will live together until their return home, the national government will ask the host municipalities for cooperation and provide them with financial support.

It will be incredibly costly. What's worse, it probably will not work the way they plan.

What's even worse, in the areas where the evacuation order has been lifted, the residents are already returning to their homes without any electricity and running water. Their homes and lands haven't been decontaminated at all. When the national government started to "decontaminate" the evacuation zone last year, all they did was to send general contractors (who sent their subcons) and Self Defense Force soldiers to the towns and villages inside the evacuation zone and decontaminate the municipal government offices. What good is that for the returning residents?

The worker who has been tweeting since March last year from Fukushima I Nuke Plant was clearly distressed (I think it was either July or August this year) when he saw people who had just returned to their home in Naraha-machi (that's where J-Village, the staging area for Fukushima I Nuke Plant work, is located). He tweeted that these people were washing things in the nearby river. He told the husband and wife that they shouldn't be doing it (to which they answered they didn't have running water so they had no choice), and that they should wait till he came back with clean water.

He tweeted, "Their home is not even decontaminated! Why do the government return these people?"

So that the government/TEPCO (now one and the same, financially) does not have to pay compensation, I guess. I can't come up with any other good reason.

(Speaking of the Great Kanto Earthquake, the massacre of Korean residents after the quake was triggered by the rumor which was intentionally spread by Matsutaro Shoriki when he worked for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. Shoriki became the owner of Yomiuri Shinbun immediately after he resigned from the Police the next year. He was also a known CIA asset after the war. It fits, doesn't it?)

Monday, September 3, 2012

If you think the Democratic Party of Japan's senior members wanting Goshi Hosono to become the next party leader (and thus prime minister of Japan) are from outer space, they now have a company. Senior members of the opposition Liberal Democratic Party, which wants to wrestle the power from the DPJ in the upcoming Lower House election, want to have as the new party leader one of the sons of Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara. They think the son will win them the election. Why? Because they think so.

Ishihara junior is the one who suggested last year that ordinary citizens should not be allowed to measure radiation levels themselves using personal survey meters, because these survey meters might be inaccurate.

Meanwhile, Goshi Hosono's latest is his grand plan to map out the "genomes" of Fukushima residents. You can bet he doesn't know what "genome" is.

It was revealed on September 3 that ex-Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and ex-Chairman of the members of the House of Councilors Mikio Aoki had decided to support Nobuteru Ishihara, LDP's Secretary-General, in the upcoming leadership election of the Liberal Democratic Party (announcement on September 14, voting on September 26). This was revealed by multiple LDP members close to Messrs. Mori and Aoki. Meanwhile. Messrs. Mori and Aoki agreed with Makoto Koga, ex-Secretary-General of LDP, to not support the current President Sadakazu Tanigaki. Mr. Tanigaki now faces an uphill battle in the election as the influential veteran politicians turn away from him, while Mr. Ishihara may now become the leading candidate.

「若い人を支持したい」。谷垣氏の出身派閥会長の古賀氏は３日、谷垣氏に通告した。

"I want to support a young person." Mr. Koga notified Mr. Tanigaki on September 3. Mr. Koga is the leader of the faction that Mr. Tanigaki belongs to.

So, how young is the young Ishihara? 55. That makes him 14 year older than Goshi Hosono (41). But the LDP seniors are in their mid 70s, so Ishihara is indeed young on the relative terms.

While TEPCO still doesn't know exactly what is causing the decrease in the amount of water being injected into the reactors to (supposedly) cool the reactors (see my previous post), the company has come up with the possible culprits: rust and plankton.

Yes, plankton. Why? Because the water being injected into the Reactor Pressure Vessels of Reactors 1, 2 and 3 at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant is not just the treated water after decontamination and desalination. The treated water is mixed with the filtered river water. Clearly, plankton escapes the filter.

Concerning the frequent problem of decreasing amount of water injected into the reactors for cooling at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, TEPCO announced on September 3 that foreign matters in dark brown color were collected after they took the water from one of the storage tanks that feed the [treated] water to the pumps for water injection and filtered it. The company thinks it is possible that rust and plankton in the water are clogging the pipes, and will conduct the analysis of the foreign matters and clean out the tanks.

I remember reading the tweets from last year by one of the workers who tweet from the plant that the water treatment system (Kurion, AREVA at that time) was being clogged up with jello-like substance because the water being treated was in part filtered river water.

By the way, TEPCO, after consulting the regulatory agency no doubt, has lowered the minimum amount of water necessary for each reactor, so that the continued operation of the plant does not constitute a deviation from the safety regulations set by NISA.

There has been hardly any change in temperature at the bottom of the RPV in each reactor anyway. I'm curious to know what would happen if they completely stopped water injection.

There are two lines in the water injection system: CS (core spray) line and FDW (feedwater) line. The one with the greater fluctuation seems to be the FDW line, looking at TEPCO's data on September 3, 2012.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

The occasion was when the boy-wonder of Osaka City Toru Hashimoto held the one and only townhall meeting to explain things about disaster debris acceptance in Osaka City on August 30 (see my previous post).

This happened after the meeting, after the boy-wonder hastily departed, guarded by plain-clothes policemen. Many citizens remained in the hall, wanting to have the answers to their questions from the officials at the city's bureau of environment. Instead of engaging the citizens, they started to remove them out of the hall, according to this blog who had the link to the IWJ video below.

About my coverage of Japan Earthquake of March 11

I am Japanese, and I not only read Japanese news sources for information on earthquake and the Fukushima Nuke Plant but also watch press conferences via the Internet when I can and summarize my findings, adding my observations.

About This Site

Well, this was, until March 11, 2011. Now it is taken over by the events in Japan, first earthquake and tsunami but quickly by the nuke reactor accident. It continues to be a one-person (me) blog, and I haven't even managed to update the sidebars after 5 months... Thanks for coming, spread the word.------------------This is an aggregator site of blogs coming out of SKF (double-short financials ETF) message board at Yahoo.

Along with commentary on day's financial news, it also provides links to the sites with financial and economic news, market data, stock technical analysis, and other relevant information that could potentially affect the financial markets and beyond.

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